Paul Otlet - Grandfather of the World Wide Web



The New York Times published a fascinating article yesterday on the work of Paul Otlet (pronounced Otley), a Belgian bibliophile who in 1934 mapped out and started to produce a card index and telephone prototype of the World Wide Web. This was eleven years before Vannevar Bush published his seminal article "As We May Think" in the Atlantic monthly. An event which is often cited as the germ of the idea which spawned hypertext and then eventually the World Wide Web.